All Girls Allowed Responds to Toddler Hit-and-Run: “Girls are Grossly Undervalued in China”

Monday, October 17, 2011

FOSHAN, Guangdong, China—If you saw a toddler lying injured on the road, would you stop?

A horrific hit-and-run incident in China was caught on tape Thursday in the city of Foshan. A two year old girl named Yue Yue was hit by a van. The van paused for a moment while she was underneath the vehicle, and then drove off, running over her legs. Afterwards, citizens walked and bicycled by her bloodied body without stopping. Several minutes later, another van drove over her.

A woman collecting garbage found the child later on and she was taken to a hospital. She was pronounced brain dead on Sunday, the China Daily reported.

A security camera caught the entire scene on video. According to the BBC, the footage was too gruesome to show.

“This is an outrage. It is sickening and tragic. What’s worse is the reality in China today—that the elimination of girls is not as uncommon as people think,” says Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed, a nonprofit devoted to restoring value to girls in China. “The reason our organization exists today is because girls in China are grossly undervalued.”

Ling says she is thankful for the commotion caused by this tragedy. “There is no way to overreact in this situation, and I am thankful for the soul-searching that this experience has created in China,” she says. “But I urge citizens to also examine this fact: today, thousands of girls will be abandoned in China—thousands tomorrow, and thousands the day after that. We’re seeing abortion, abandonment and trafficking of girls at such high rates today that a massive gender imbalance has been created.

"As Chinese people ponder this tragedy, they should also ponder the tragedy of 37 million missing girls throughout the entire nation.”

All Girls Allowed brings life, value and dignity to girls and mothers in China by supporting families in poor areas of China who choose to give birth to girls and raise them in love, rescuing them from prenatal sex selection, infanticide and abandonment. The organization has seen great success in their work in rural China, but Ling says that much remains to be done.

“For 900 years, until the mid-twentieth century, girls’ feet were still being bound in China, a practice that included the forceful breaking of a girl’s foot-bones. Yet, even this horrific tradition was abolished within one generation,” says Ling. “We believe that the same thing can happen today to end the gendercide of girls. Chinese citizens have social media and tools that the anti-foot-binding movement never had—we are watching to see which willing individuals will rise up to start something that truly changes China’s treatment of women and girls forever.”

Finally, Ling has some words for Americans who are shocked by this tragedy. "People knew that a girl was dying and yet kept on walking," says Ling. "Our first reaction is to judge and say, 'what horrible people'. Yet we know that 37 million girls have been killed or abandoned in China since the One-Child Policy started in 1980, and most Americans continue to act as if nothing is happening. Will we stop and respond, or ignore the situation?"

Our hearts at All Girls Allowed go out to Yue Yue's family. May the God of peace comfort your hearts during this difficult time.

All Girls Allowed (http://www.allgirlsallowed.org) was founded by Chai Ling in 2010 with a mission to display the love of Jesus by restoring life, value and dignity to girls and mothers in China and to reveal the injustice of the One-Child Policy. “In Jesus’ Name, Simply Love Her.”

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